IS THERE STILL A JOURNAL OF TRANSPORTATION ECONOMICS AND POLICY?

There's a research project waiting to be investigated.

Texans spent another weekend playing their least favorite game, the Texas Transportation Scramble.

Contestants start by getting texts that their flights have been delayed or canceled. In trying to rearrange travel, contestants realize airline routes are scrambled, and they must each make a strategic decision: Go to the airport and try to maneuver onto another flight; rent a car; find a ride; stay another night.

Texans have played this game over and over during the pandemic, but it wasn’t unknown in the before times. Our airplanes and roads are full, thanks to growth in population, visitors and business. The lesson of the game: Texas needs to increase its transportation capacity among major cities.

Texas has a large enough intrastate transportation demand that years ago Southwest Airlines served as one of two prototypes for airline deregulation (Pacific Southwest, in California was the other) because as an intrastate carrier it was not subject to the process-heavy cartel management of the Civil Aeronautics Board.  Those cheap intrastate flights, plus generous speed limits on the expressways, drove the passenger railroads, which generally treated Texas cities as end-points for overnight trains out of New Orleans or St. Louis or Denver anyway, out of the regional rail business long before Amtrak showed up.  The air carriers, however, have been converted by twenty years of security theater and two years of corona tyranny into unpleasant conveyances, and the reluctance of the freight railroads to go after the short-haul intermodal has turned the interstates into exercises in truck-dodging.

All that combines to get the fourth estate interested in connecting the major cities by corridor trains.

Hopping in a car or even on a nice bus for city-to-city jaunts aren’t great options either. The same growth affecting airports is choking the freeways. Expanding to meet demand would cost taxpayers and travelers billions more.

In 2010, there were 21 million vehicles registered in Texas, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles. At the end of 2020, that number had risen by 3 million.

Texas wisely built good roads and airports years ago and continues to expand and maintain them. But regular drivers on Interstate-35 or Interstate-45 can see that the constant construction hardly keeps up with population growth.

Texas Central anticipates its trains will carry 6 million passengers per year by 2029, if the state’s policymakers are wise enough to see the benefits.

Imagine removing millions of Dallas and Houston drivers off of the interstate and onto rail. Imagine arriving at the nearest big city airport for a trip, and there aren’t quite so many under-caffeinated cross-state commuters sighing when you take an extra 10 seconds to contemplate your Starbucks order.

A rising tide of transportation capacity can lift all of our spirits and keep our economic engine revving.

Presumably, if these are proper trains, the savvy traveller can purchase a pick-me-up and do some work without having to go into airplane mode on the train.  That is, if the landed gentry lift their objections to these rail lines, which have been contemplated for nearly twenty years, being built.

As those intrastate flyers are generally hiring cars in some way to get to their meetings, railway stations with proper cab ranks might be in order.